Two ERC Starting Grants for Scientists at the University of Cologne

Economist and social scientist Professor Dr Christopher Roth and plant scientist Professor Dr Markus Stetter from the University of Cologne have each been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC). The Starting Grant provides funding of up to 1.5 million euros for a period of five years to excellent early-career researchers. “We are very pleased about two new ERC Starting Grants. I would like to congratulate our two scientists on this great success,” said Professor Dr Joybrato Mukherjee, Rector of the University of Cologne.

Christopher Roth, Professor at the Faculty of Management, Economics and Social Sciences and member of the Cluster of Excellence ECONtribute: Markets & Public Policy, receives the ERC Starting Grant for his project ‘Viral Narratives: The Role of Narratives for Economic Belief Formation’.

The project aims to provide a comprehensive analysis of the life cycle and impact of economic narratives – from their emergence and dissemination to their influence on economic behavior.

Narratives are structured stories designed to convey information or ideas in a way that evokes a certain effect or reaction from the audience. Narratives can be used to explain complex topics, form opinions or communicate social and cultural values. Roth uses online experiments with collected language data, survey methods and artificial intelligence to find out, for example, why certain narratives on the financial and property markets go viral. He also analyzes the mechanisms that make narratives convincing. This research approach provides a comprehensive view of how economic narratives emerge, how they spread and what effects they have on economic behaviors and beliefs.

ECONtribute is the only DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence in economics and a joint initiative of the Universities of Bonn and Cologne. “The ERC Starting Grant allows me to further expand the interdisciplinary research approach of our Cluster of Excellence,” said Roth.

Professor Dr Markus Stetter conducts research at the Institute for Plant Sciences at the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences and is a member of the CEPLAS Cluster of Excellence. He has been awarded the ERC Starting Grant for the project ‘Reconstruction of Specialized Metabolite Evolution Through Molecular Switches’ (ROSE).

Novelty is what drives evolution. However, new compounds have to be integrated into the complex system of an organism. Plants have managed to integrate a large number of specific ingredients. How a new metabolic pathway can be integrated and even replace an existing one remains unknown. As part of ROSE, Stetter and his team will investigate the evolution of metabolites – i.e. products of metabolic processes – and thus promote a better understanding of the connection between new plant compounds and the regulatory networks that link the interaction of genes and traits.

They focus on specific pigments: anthocyanin, red pigments that are responsible for the dark colors of blood oranges or cherries, and betalain pigments, which can be found in beetroot. Although the two substances look similar in color, they are biochemically very different. Notably, no plant has yet been identified that produces both pigments. Betalain pigments are an example of evolutionary innovation as they have been newly integrated and functionally replace anthocyanin pigments. Using the evolutionary replacement of anthocyanin pigments with betalain pigments as a natural model for the integration of new metabolites into existing systems provides the unique opportunity to understand if and how metabolite replacements proceed. ROSE aims to achieve unprecedented power and precision in the identification of gene regulatory networks by integrating a range of analyses from single cells to populations and entire species. This will reveal the similarities and differences in the regulation of these pigments.

The researchers want to find out whether a new metabolic pathway has replaced an old one, but kept the regulatory network intact. Overall, the results will shed light on the process of metabolite evolution and enable the engineering of new metabolic pathways to improve the stress tolerance and the nutritional quality of crops. The results can thus help to breed new or more resistant crops and contribute to securing global food security.

“Thanks to the ERC grant, we will be able to understand completely new ways of evolution and hopefully make a contribution to greater sustainability,” said Stetter. He is a member of the CEPLAS Cluster of Excellence on Plant Sciences, in which the participating researchers develop novel strategies for sustainable plant breeding. CEPLAS combines the resources of the Universities of Cologne and Düsseldorf, the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research and Forschungszentrum Jülich to form an internationally leading hub in plant sciences.

Find the article on the website of the University of Cologne.